They've been having issues for a while. It has been hacked and infected with viruses several times.I believe they are currently beta testing for a new site since this one is old and has a bunch of issues.

The way that Google works is when it scans a site for updated info for the search engine, it also looks at all the outgoing links, and what probably has happened is there was comment spam that had a link that pointed to a download of spyware, malware, scareware or something like that. As long as you didn't click on that link you should be fine.

Your best bet is to scan your computer using your antivirus software with updated definitions and then scan with an online scan like bit defender or trendmicro.

You normally can't get a virus by simply browsing a site. You have to click on a link that downloads software to install it. The only exceptions is if a pop up ad popped up and installed something using an Adobe PDF exploit which has since been patched. It is always good to never let anything install automatically, use something other than IE, use a good ad blocking extension lik ead block plus and no script, and make sure to update software like your browser, adobe, and your operating system's updates.

Not sure if they're actually beta testing yet. Each time it's mentioned it's "next week," which has essentially been the case since early February.

anyway, yeah, when you get the malware warning, it's best to stay away. I'm not sure if vegweb even reads the posts on their facebook wall (as they don't respond to them), but I let them know on there each time it happens anyway :/

Well, hopefully this new site will ACTUALLY be in effect soon, and will actually have better security. We'll see.

two or three weeks ago every time I visited the site my computer went crazy and warned me to get away. This happened on both computers. I think I wound up picking up some malware anyway and had to clean everything. But no problems since (hopefully).

If you look at the Past Activity section of StopBadware.org's page for vegweb (scroll to the bottom and click "more..."), you can see that vegweb has been on Google's suspicious site list more than a dozen times since mid-December. The admins here have been fairly quiet about the issue, but it seems like they plan to make a new site instead of fixing the underlying security weakness(es) in the existing site. So, until the new site is ready, saying it has stopped would be misleading; it is more like an intermission.

You normally can't get a virus by simply browsing a site. You have to click on a link that downloads software to install it. The only exceptions is if a pop up ad popped up and installed something using an Adobe PDF exploit

In the case of vegweb, typically the suspicious activity is in the form of an obfuscated javascript element at the very beginning of the page (even before the doctype) which generates an iframe (usually 1x1 pixels, but sometimes obscured by other means) to some other (presumably malicious) site. However, when I've tried to look at the contents of the iframe, I just get redirected to a well-known site (e.g. youtube) and haven't been able to figure out how the rest of the attack is supposed to work. Anyway, based on the location of the javascript, I gather that the hacker is able to inject arbitrary code into vegweb's php files. If that is right, then visiting vegweb isn't really much safer than clicking a spam link or failing to block a pop-up ad.

Any news about the efforts to fix this? Is beta-testing of the new site still scheduled to begin next week?

Also, it looks (based on the link at the very bottom of this page) like this site is running SMF 1.1.12. Would it be possible to upgrade to 1.1.16 while we wait for the new site? I'm not sure if that would really help, but I ask because both 1.1.16 and 1.1.15 are described as "critical security patches", which makes them sound important.

Yeah, seriously it's become such a headache. Time and time again I try to come here to post something or review something, only for it to be down for a few days. By the time it's back up, I've lost interest or forgotten.

Ok, so the site is old and needs to be upgraded. And fine, they've been working on it. But I don't care how secure and spam-free (LOL) the new site will be if it continues to be run this way. People notify vegweb of issues on facebook, and there's no acknowledgement. No post about the virus warning, no response to questions. Either they don't check or don't care, and frankly I have to think it's the latter, considering they'd have to know people are posting to their wall before they go ahead and post promotional stuff. Surely people have sent them email or PMs or whatever too.

Even if they're swamped, it's pretty quick to post a general status thing on facebook and could be done instead of (not!) individually replying to people who message them.

If they're swamped or understaffed or whatever, the release of the new site isn't necessarily going to fix that. There's still site maintenance, and the new site could crash or have bugs or need security updates as well.

Further, this site we keep hearing about. It's been apparently in the works for well over a year now. More recently, we were told the launch would be mid-February. Here we are in April, and no news. Even if it's going to take a while, at least update us or give us a reasonable time frame. Don't say "soon!" hoping that will mean traffic until the actual release date, versus telling people June and having people check out until then.

It's all pretty frustrating. I love vegweb, but that's really to say I love the user-submitted content and the community here. I don't love how this stuff is being handled. And it's sad that lack of management may mean losing a significant part of that community that has been built and changed over the years. I feel like, even after this supposed site launch, it'll be a good while until all the regulars come back (if that ever happens) and things are rolling again. Hell, based on how things have worked in the past, we were due for a gift exchange back in March. There's no way in hell anything like that could be organized any time soon. And the cooking challenge has been seriously messed up because of this (props to tweety and blinknoodle for keeping it up).

Is Vegweb dead? so many people have been scared off. And...Did Vegnews kill Vegweb on purpose, to get rid of competition? Because the Admins don't respond or seem to care.Not everyone has or wants Facebook.Are they going to say "Oh well no one comes on anymore" and take the site down??

Thanks so much for posting your concerns, we're reading them and hearing you. We know this is incredibly frustrating and we're so sorry.

Just so you all know we're working really hard on keeping this site healthy as we get our beautiful new site up and running. Please bear with us during this time of transition, we promise that things will be much better soon!

Best,Laura

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Posted by faunablues on May 02, 2012 · Member since Aug 2003 · 9655 posts